I'm with Man Eating Duck - want to keep the db neat and want to hoard everything too, and exactly for the same reasons.

I'm too lazy to do file renaming; downloaded books have usually quite varied naming rules. If they are all in one folder... I'm afraid it'll be rather difficult to find one single file. Much easier to find it in Calibre (for me).

I for one love custom columns and can't have too much of them, though most of them are invisible or shown only on Book Details panel. And, if in the future I decide to get rid of some, it's much easier to pile all the data into tags than to sort tags into different columns.

As for myself, I add a txt format to the book. There I note all kind of things - original format, conversion process (Calibre, Mobi Reader), typos and bad formatting I found when I read it in mobi, changes I did and changes I want but don't know yet how to do etc. Of course, all my changes so far are pretty simple, common S&R should undo them nicely.
Also, this txt format serves me as a 'Read' tag, as I don't have any plain text books.

I'm with Man Eating Duck - want to keep the db neat and want to hoard everything too, and exactly for the same reasons.

I guess I'm not much of a hoarder, except perhaps of books I want to read. If I have a Preferred book format in a readable condition (read with little to no annoyance) I'm content with it. In those cases I don't need the Original format lying around in calibre getting in the way, particularly when I can easily retrieve any Original format if necessary from the Raw folder where I keep the original download files. For some exceptions I do keep and read Original format. The temporary "read on device format" - I see no possible reason for me to keep it lying around after reading it, considering another one can be generated on the fly from "master copy" Preferred Format.

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I'm too lazy to do file renaming; downloaded books have usually quite varied naming rules. If they are all in one folder... I'm afraid it'll be rather difficult to find one single file. Much easier to find it in Calibre (for me).

I don't rename most of them, just throw them in a folder. Most of them arrive with titles and author relatively intact in filename, but I do rename those that don't, such as from Project Gutenberg. Not onerous for a few books. (Or for a lot of them: Add them, edit authors, series, title if necessary, then Save to Disk with filenames fixed, they are still the raw downloaded formats). Later I just do simple OS search of Pending (awaiting Add) or Raw (added copy to calibre) folder for 1 or 2 keywords from authorname, in combination when necessary with 1 or 2 keywords from title. Such as "cordwainer underpeople". Not difficult to find something. Also, the need to look for something in Raw is rare. I do frequently search Pending folder, which has some legacy books not yet Added into calibre, no big deal, they gradually get Added.

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I for one love custom columns and can't have too much of them, though most of them are invisible or shown only on Book Details panel. And, if in the future I decide to get rid of some, it's much easier to pile all the data into tags than to sort tags into different columns.

I can pile my tags from custom columns into Tags when necessary too. I have a feeling, not based on any evidence, that "fewer" custom columns may improve performance over "more" custom columns. Aside from that, for me it is an inclination toward keeping things simple and economic. Fewer places to look in calibre, fewer complications to go wrong or need maintenance. When I was a few months into using calibre, I had all my tags in Tags column. As abbreviations. So they looked like a mess and it was more difficult to see/interpret a lot of them at once due to multi-tag column internal sorting. I like them much better in separate columns, each custom column with what I deem is an important focus, for enough books to be worthwhile.

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As for myself, I add a txt format to the book. There I note all kind of things - original format, conversion process (Calibre, Mobi Reader), typos and bad formatting I found when I read it in mobi, changes I did and changes I want but don't know yet how to do etc. Of course, all my changes so far are pretty simple, common S&R should undo them nicely.
Also, this txt format serves me as a 'Read' tag, as I don't have any plain text books.

I like that idea. Smart. I'm too lazy. I decided to implement that last year sometime after you mentioned it, and then stopped after a week or so.

In sum, and in general: No way is "the right way". Everyone is different, in needs, strategies, workflow, inclinations, etc. Sometimes I change my ways. (Now I've got Santana, "Evil Ways" running through my head…)

Unboggling, FWIW, my approach to the long title / path names is to put the "extra bits" of title in a custom Subtitle / Subseries Column simply to get them out of the way. I sync my Calibre libraries between Win at the office and Mac at home with Dropbox.

FWIW, I found that Mac is more tolerant of long file and path names, but that "keep it short" works best. I had had a long persistent issue with the Library Maintenance > Check Library > Match to Database generating the same "extra title" errors over and over on three books. It finally dawned that all of the books involved had very long titles. Hand shortening titles in the Mac install then re-saving cured this. That never "stuck" in the Win Install, so the errors re-populated themselves.

GeekyGal, that part of your post didn't sink through my thick skull earlier. But it did today. I hadn't run Library Check for a few months. It caught about 20 invalid titles. I checked them. None were long titles. There were no visible problems with any of those books, no extra visible files. But most of them seemed familiar because I'd looked at those folders with keyboard shortcut "O" lately. So I tested some more on other books, and sure enough, just opening the author folder of a book makes it show up as invalid title, listed as author name in the list in Check Library. Deleting marked didn't delete any of the book formats, covers, or .opf's.

So I'd guess that OS X is doing something with invisible files and calibre is detecting them. I'm currently on Mountain Lion, and don't recall this particular thing happening with Snow Leopard, though I might have missed it in the past.

Anyway, so far my long titles are okay. My book files don't go back and forth between different OSs. And they don't reside on DropBox or another server farm either. Seems I've got a plague of invisible files, and you had a plague of cross-filesystem incompatibilities.

Edit: Regarding long titles in filenames on OS X, whoops -- I was wrong. GeekyGal was right. I recently noticed trouble with long filenames when saving books to disk. So shorter filenames are safer.

Last edited by unboggling; 02-06-2014 at 01:51 AM.
Reason: Long filename trouble.

Tested various page setup profiles, input and output, used in conversion of original format to EPUB master format. Decided to stick with input profile Default input profile and output profile Kindle Output Profile for consistency in the library. Those settings can be adjusted to tailor a format for a specific device per recommended page setup profile settings, but that seems like too much trouble, while I am willing to accept the slightly incorrect sizing of images like covers or maps on specific reading devices for most books. A subsequent conversion with tailored settings can be done later if necessary for image-laden books. Covered in brief discussion in the Reading section.

Got a good file syncing utility, tested various setups for automatically syncing calibre library and configuration folders, and added discussion in the Maintaining section about one-way sync of those calibre folders to an external drive, automatically run at computer startup, to function as a secondary backup. Previously I copied those folders in the operating system after quitting calibre, manually and less frequently because I usually forgot to do it regularly. The primary backup is automated incremental backup of changes on entire startup drive hourly by an OS X backup utility, including calibre library and configuration folders, to a different external drive.

Specific or small revisions, too many to mention. Hence a general progress report rather than specific revision notes.

Since you mentioned in the other thread that you're using Moon+, have you had any problems with Moon+ not reporting itself as an epub or mobi reader? I have the paid Pro version, and it shows up as a pdf reader option in CC, but won't answer calls for other formats.

It's not really essential right now, as I've been importing from within Moon+ anyway, but as I get more content on my tablet, there's a good chance I will prefer to navigate my collection from within CC instead. I've reinstalled both CC and Moon+ Pro, and then rebooted the tablet and resynced, but no joy. I'm just wondering if the issue is specific to me somehow or if it's a limitation of Moon+.

[QUOTE=CWatkinsNash;2253791]Since you mentioned in the other thread that you're using Moon+, have you had any problems with Moon+ not reporting itself as an epub or mobi reader? I have the paid Pro version, and it shows up as a pdf reader option in CC, but won't answer calls for other formats.[quote]

I too have the paid version and have no trouble using it as a ePub reader via CC.

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Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash

It's not really essential right now, as I've been importing from within Moon+ anyway, but as I get more content on my tablet, there's a good chance I will prefer to navigate my collection from within CC instead.

I stopped importing anything into Moon+ and use CC to open all my books with Moon+.

Quote:

Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash

I've reinstalled both CC and Moon+ Pro, and then rebooted the tablet and resynced, but no joy. I'm just wondering if the issue is specific to me somehow or if it's a limitation of Moon+.

If I understand correctly uninstalling and reinstalling may reload your previous settings from backup. That is how my tablet is setup. I'm no expert, but if you go to Settings - App info and clear defaults and clear cache I think you should be OK.

I stopped importing anything into Moon+ and use CC to open all my books with Moon+.

I suspect I will want to do that also. Though Moon+ is the best of the readers I've tried so far, browsing is frustrating, especially compared to CC.

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Originally Posted by DoctorOhh

If I understand correctly uninstalling and reinstalling may reload your previous settings from backup. That is how my tablet is setup. I'm no expert, but if you go to Settings - App info and clear defaults and clear cache I think you should be OK.

Good Luck.

I generally do that prior to uninstalling an app anyway, just to avoid remnants, but to be sure I did it again for both apps and I still can't open anything but pdfs. Since this is turning into an unintentional thread hijack, I'll post this over in the devices subforum.

I generally do that prior to uninstalling an app anyway, just to avoid remnants, but to be sure I did it again for both apps and I still can't open anything but pdfs. Since this is turning into an unintentional thread hijack, I'll post this over in the devices subforum.

I'm a little confused, I suspect that you make some other app the default for ePub. When you open a ePub from CC does it open in any other app? If so you need to clear the defaults of that app.

Cut the Help section, which didn't really fit with the rest of it. Moved that Help content to its own thread: calibre Help Resources.

Otherwise the content has stabilized considerably, so I no longer feel a need to revise it daily. For now I plan to replace Post #1 at least once a month, to keep it relatively consistent with changes in calibre or in my actual workflow, configurations, or settings.